Transforming Businesses with Reporting Automation Solutions

case study

Reporting Automation for Complex Systems

Industry: Civil Engineering

Civil engineering is one of the more complex businesses on the planet. This complexity is the result of the weight of municipal, state, federal, industry, and insurance compliance mandates that must be factored into the equation on every civil engineering project. To demonstrate adherence to the many laws and other compulsory expectations, regular reports must be filed on every aspect of the project from design to completion.

The Problem:

One of the leading civil engineering firms in the state came to the Hawkins Consulting team requesting help to streamline their arduous and complex mixture of manual and computerized reporting. At that time, their field reporting process for their inspectors and engineers was a very time-intensive process that required huge amounts of manpower and was a significant expense. To help you understand the complexity involved, here is a brief outline of their original workflow.

Each day Inspectors would hand write notes/reports, then scan/email them to the Admin Team. (These Reports had little structure/format.)
The Admin Team would receive around 200 reports each day from the field. They would then have to type each report into a Word Document, then Convert it to a PDF.
The Field Supervisors would receive this deluge of reports each day by email for their approval.
At the end of Each Week, the Admin Team would compile all reports for each individual project (~200+ Projects Active Per Week) and merge the PDFs of each Daily Report.
Along with the ~ 200 weekly Project Reports, the Admin Team had to include summaries of each report on a manually typed cover page.
Once the Admin Team had finished their mountain of paperwork, it was forwarded to the Engineering Team by email to approve the Weekly Summary Reports
After approval of the Weekly Summary Reports by the Engineering Team, the Admin Team then emails out Weekly Summary Reports.

Then, the work week ends, and the whole process starts all over again.
The engineering firm wanted a better way to gather, organize, and finalize reports for their clients.

The Consulting Process

We undertook a detailed consultation with the key stakeholders within the engineering firm to understand the enormity of the challenge they had given us.

The biggest part of the challenge facing the Hawkins team was that there was nothing available commercially to do what the client needed to accomplish.

This left the Hawkins with only one option – develop a simple, user-friendly solution to a complex reporting challenge from scratch specifically for this client. The complexity of the solution required a staged development process of several years, but it all began with a consultation process.

Here’s a look into that consultation process.

We engaged with Subject Matter Experts involved in the process within the Engineering firm, including members of the Field Staff/ Field Supervisors, the Admin Team, and the Engineering Team.

Much useful information came from those initial meetings, but to ensure that we covered every angle, the Hawkins Consulting team conducted a deep dive, gathering every necessary piece of data through job shadowing to understand their workflow better and asking questions geared to understanding how we could make their day-to-day reporting work easier for them.

Following those discussions, we returned to the engineering firm with a roadmap to address every challenge they had presented to us. Our roadmap included a proposed timeline and a phased execution of the software development process.

The Implementation and Quality Assurance Process:

Once we had presented our proposal along with the associated implementation roadmap and had gotten approval to proceed, we started the process of developing the software using an iterative process known as agile software development.

To begin with, we developed a proof of concept Minimum Viable Project that covered all the base use cases.
The solution that the Hawkins team developed and Implemented for the client was a web application. This web application was built completely from scratch using PHP, MySQL, and Bootstrap as the core technologies. The platform’s web server is hosted on Microsoft Azure. All development, testing, configuration, and deployment was done by the Hawkins Team.

The Hawkins Team utilized Agile Software Development Methodologies to deliver value tangible prototypes and value as early as possible while working closely with the client to shape and guide future development and improvements. Through bi-weekly client demos, the Hawkins Team was able to valuable software to the client’s end users. The software changed so much about employees’ day-to-day work and made significant improvements to efficiency.
Along with that software, we produced training materials and hosted training sessions to teach the engineering firm’s staff how to leverage the software in their workflow.

The real-world use of our software brought very useful feedback from the engineering firm’s team. We took each suggestion seriously and brought out new iterations of the software based on the feedback of this early testing.

Once our team and the client were satisfied with the performance of the reporting software, we helped them phase out the old, time-consuming, and costly manual process and systematically brought the new software-driven process online within their workflow.

The Results:

Today, all the engineering firm’s field staff use an intuitive web application that we developed to write their reports in standardized, cloud-based forms. These reports are generated in PDF Form and are easily compiled into weekly reports. Weekly Report Cover Page Summaries are automatically generated by the system based on the requirements of the individual report. All users can now easily approve reports within the new system and email the reports to clients directly from the new system.

The Reaction:

Management in each department was very happy with the time savings.
End Users liked the ease of the new system once they had learned it.
The new workflow allowed seven of their hardworking staff to move from tedious, manual input tasks to more rewarding work that is more valuable to the firm.

The Business Impact
As a result of the software development and implementation of our software solution, the engineering firm reports that they have been able to provide better customer service. The reports they now can generate are more uniform, and standardized reports can be produced that cover all required information per State Requirements. The staff that was freed from manual input work made an easy transition into other departments, including the finance department, where they joined the finance team, helping them clean up old issues and stay on top of current invoicing.

Learn More About Hawkins Consulting
The Hawkins Consulting team is a full-stack IT management and software development partner for some of the most complex businesses in the Bay Area. We specialize in helping companies like yours overcome process challenges that hinder your creativity, limit your organizational flexibility, and obstruct your ability to scale effectively.

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